After the Gulf War, American leaders began to scale back the armed forces. The infantry, especially the Eleven Bravo units, suffered some of the deepest cuts from the economizing scalpel. Three entire light infantry divisions were phased out. Almost all remaining grunt units, mech and light, were chronically understrength. As always, Americans particularly underestimated the importance of their light fighters. "Light-infantrymen are a unique breed," the historian Adrian Lewis sagely wrote, "a unique national resource that has been continuously undervalued in American culture, in part, by the erroneous belief that anybody can serve as a combat soldier. The American fetish for advanced technologies further devalued the role of soldiers. This was no small loss, but it went almost unnoticed, until they were needed again." And, as Colonel Bolger sensed in 1998, they would be needed again-badly-in the urban battlefields that only infantry can truly master. "What will happen," he asked presciently, "in a future war when we have only the wonderful warplanes, we bomb and bomb, and the enemy does not crack?" Unfortunately, very few American policymakers in the late 1990s and early 2000s bothered to ask themselves this very same question. The sad result was old lessons learned by a new generation.9
CHAPTER 9.
Grunts in the City: Urban Combat and Politics-Fallujah, 2004.
Welcome to the City!
DESERT STORM SIGNALED A REVOLUTION in warfare. From now on, wars would be fought at a distance with guided munitions, precision weaponry, and a full range of information-age technological weapons. America"s enemies would be cowed into submission by the sheer ubiquity and lethality of guided bomb units, cruise missiles, laser-guided munitions, and other high-tech millennium weaponry. Rather than depend upon a slow-moving, difficult-to-deploy ma.s.s army with its attendant fleets of vehicles, American decision makers concentrated on creating a smaller, lighter, more agile ground force. In the future, most of the fighting would be done by the planes and ships with a.s.sistance from a small retinue of highly trained Special Forces and SEAL ground pounders. Modern technology had apparently made the infantryman obsolete, a quaint relic of a pre-information-age past. At least that was the thinking among far too many in the defense establishment of the late 1990s and early 2000s (Donald Rumsfeld being the most infamous example). As was so often the case, though, Americans were preparing for the war they wished to fight rather than the one they were likely to fight. The whole mind-set reflected the longtime American dream that wars could be fought from a safe distance, scientifically, rapidly, decisively, and logically, with little political strife. It was a veritable echo chamber, eerily reminiscent of similar claims made in the wake of World War II about the supposed revolution wrought by nuclear weapons.
The problem was that in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States instead found itself enmeshed in counterinsurgent ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In spite of the tremendous American technological and material advantage, a confusing stew of tenacious insurgent groups in both countries bedeviled America"s strategic aims of rolling back Islamic terrorism and creating stable democracies. "In the United States, we"ve become so accustomed to high-tech weaponry, so a.s.sured of our own power, that we"ve become blind to who actually does the fighting and dying . . . infantrymen . . . twenty-year-old men who hunt other men with rifles," Owen West, a military commentator and former Marine officer, wrote, quite perceptively, as these wars raged. Indeed, these young volunteer riflemen of the early twenty-first century were bearing the brunt of both wars, serving multiple tours, patrolling endlessly, sacrificing more than those at home could ever begin to understand. The grunts of this so-called global war on terror were indispensable and, as usual, America did not have anywhere near enough of them.
This is not to say that American domination of the air, control of the seas, ubiquitous satellite imagery, and precision "shock and awe" weaponry were not important. They were all vital. But their techno-vangelist proponents had simply oversold the considerable merits of a good product. It was unfair to expect standoff weaponry to achieve anything more than limited strategic aims in Afghanistan and Iraq. A joint direct attack munition (JDAM), for instance, is an accurate and effective piece of aerial ordnance. These bombs can routinely hit targets with a margin of error under ten meters. But they cannot control ground or people; nor can they favorably influence popular opinion (indeed, the bomb"s impersonal destruction usually tends to spike anti-American sentiment). Only foot soldiers can patrol an area, secure its infrastructure, develop relationships with locals, and defeat a guerrilla enemy. And only ground troops, especially infantry, can secure cities.
The war in Iraq was a cla.s.sic example of this axiom. In 2003, President George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein"s odious regime, eliminate any potential threat that Saddam might employ weapons of ma.s.s destruction (an infamously unfounded fear, as it turned out), and transform a traditionally volatile, dictatorial country into a stable democracy. These were ambitious goals, far more challenging than the simple mission of throwing Saddam out of the Kuwaiti desert in 1991. Yet war planners in 2003 unleashed their invasion with less than half the number of troops that Bush"s father had employed to win the 1991 desert war.
The twenty-first-century plan was to paralyze the Hussein regime with "shock and awe" guided bombs and cruise missiles while an armor-heavy ground force unleashed a lightning thrust through the desert to Baghdad. Their mission was to bypa.s.s the southern Iraqi cities, get to Baghdad, and decapitate the regime, before Saddam could recover and use the nukes and chemical weapons he did not really have. Once Saddam was gone, the country would then settle into a happily-ever-after coda with their American liberators. In the run-up to the war, Vice President d.i.c.k Cheney outlined this rosy scenario: "I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators," he told one journalist. "The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but that they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that." Norman Schwarzkopf, the commanding general for Desert Storm, later said, "I . . . picked up vibes that . . . you"re going to have this ma.s.sive strike with ma.s.sive weaponry, and basically that"s going to be it, and we just clean up the battlefield after that."
Basically, that was the plan, and it grew from many generations of wrongheaded thinking in America about what war is, how wars are fought and won, and what they truly cost. The Bush administration invasion planners of 2003 sought to avoid urban combat because it tended to be so b.l.o.o.d.y, protracted, and destructive. Also, they avoided the cities because they knew they did not have anywhere near enough ground soldiers to secure them. So, invading columns bypa.s.sed much resistance that later morphed into a full-blown insurgency. Yet the cities were the the center of gravity for the Iraqi population. Indeed, 70 percent of Iraq"s population lived in the cities. As a result, any invader who wished to control the country had to control those cities, not bypa.s.s them. Moreover, in an ominous harbinger, when the Americans in the spring of 2003 entered such cities as Nasiriyah and Baghdad, they found themselves involved in hard fighting. center of gravity for the Iraqi population. Indeed, 70 percent of Iraq"s population lived in the cities. As a result, any invader who wished to control the country had to control those cities, not bypa.s.s them. Moreover, in an ominous harbinger, when the Americans in the spring of 2003 entered such cities as Nasiriyah and Baghdad, they found themselves involved in hard fighting.
What followed is, of course, well known. Some Iraqis, particularly Shiites and Kurds, did welcome the U.S.-led coalition as liberators. Others, especially Sunnis in Al Anbar province, were determined to resist the invasion. The coalition did overthrow Saddam"s government. In the months that followed, though, the occupiers, through spectacular incompetence and lack of cultural understanding, were overwhelmed by the job of creating a new Iraq. The Americans did not have anywhere near enough troops to secure the country and rebuild it. Multiple insurgent groups-Sunni and Shiite-sprouted from the resulting malevolent seeds of unemployment, looting, discontent, and disillusionment. The sad result, by 2004, was a full-blown guerrilla war against elusive insurgents who sniped at the Americans, ambushed them when they could, curried world opinion with Net-centric, media-savvy information-age propaganda, and inflicted devastating casualties upon them with the improvised explosive device (IED), the terrorist version of a standoff weapon (and a chillingly effective one at that).
By this time, the main arena of contest was, ironically, the cities. Day after day, American soldiers carried out an unglamorous struggle to control the roads and the urban sprawl in such places as Baghdad, Najaf, Mosul, Kirkuk, Bakuba, Samarra, Ramadi, and Fallujah. The sad reality was that there were nowhere near enough troops to do the job. The war had devolved into a messy, unpopular counterinsurgent struggle for the urban soul of Iraq. Indeed, by the spring of 2004, many of the cities, including Najaf, the Shiite slums of Sadr City in east Baghdad, and Fallujah, were pregnant with menace, teetering toward an explosion of violence. In April, when the powder keg blew, these cities turned into full-blown battlegrounds. Once again, the Americans had to relearn the unhappy lesson that urban combat is an infantryman"s game and that, technological advances notwithstanding, ground combat never goes out of style. The cla.s.sic example was Fallujah.1 Vigilant Resolve?!
Since late April 2003, when American soldiers first entered Fallujah in substantial numbers, the town had bubbled with tension. This was a Sunni city with significant pro-Saddam sentiment. This was where imams controlled lucrative trading routes from Syria, where they dominated access to information and markets, and had done so for centuries. The people of Fallujah believed in their inherent superiority to their Shiite countrymen. They had dominated them for decades. The cruelty of Saddam"s regime had worked in the favor of Fallujahns, empowering them. The democracy-minded Americans were a threat to this old order. They were also culturally ignorant, heavy-handed in the use of their firepower and in their relations with locals.
By the summer and fall of 2003, this combustible situation had boiled over into outright violence between Sunni insurgents and troopers from the 82nd Airborne Division. In at least two instances, the Americans opened fire on unruly crowds, killing civilians. The locals simmered with anger over American firepower (notice how this U.S. strength had turned into a liability in an urban, information-age environment). When the 1st Marine Division, of Peleliu fame, took responsibility for Fallujah in early 2004, the leathernecks hoped to pacify the situation there by adopting a more benign approach than their Army colleagues. But the mood in the city was not receptive to rapprochement and the situation was only growing worse by the day. Fallujah teemed with weapons and guerrilla fighters. By and large, the city had become "no go" territory for the Americans. In this sense, Fallujah was indicative of an anti-American revolt that was bubbling among many of the Sunni tribes all over Al Anbar province.
Very simply put, a major confrontation was brewing. In times like this, a flash-point event can sometimes touch off a larger conflict. On March 31, insurgents in Fallujah ambushed four American private security contractors from Blackwater USA. As the contractors (all of them former military) drove on Highway 10, the main route through the heart of Fallujah, insurgents machine-gunned and grenaded their cars, killing them. A venomous crowd then dragged their bodies through the streets, set them ablaze, and hung the charred remains from a bridge that spanned the Euphrates River.
The Marines knew who was responsible for this barbarous attack and they were determined to round them up at a deliberate pace, rather than react with overwhelming force. "Iraqis would see harsh reprisal as an act of vengeance," said Lieutenant General James Conway, commander of the corps-sized I Marine Expeditionary Force, which was responsible for Al Anbar. His immediate subordinate, Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, concurred. He had no desire to make any attempt to seize Fallujah. He knew that fighting for the city would be costly. He understood that he did not have the resources or manpower to rebuild the city whenever the fighting did end, much less pacify and care for a quarter million hostile Fallujahns. What"s more, any attack on Fallujah needed an Iraqi stamp of approval, and the shaky provisional government in Baghdad was hardly on board with the idea.
But American leaders, from Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) head Paul Bremer to President Bush, found it impossible to ignore the disturbing pictures of the crowd and the burned bodies. The Fallujah attack was unique and visceral. Thus it had dramatic repercussions. Desecration of bodies is a major taboo in American culture. It had happened at Mogadishu in 1993, and Fallujah was an unwelcome reminder of this awful nightmare. In the view of Bush, Bremer, and Rumsfeld, the desecration represented a worldwide humiliation for the United States and a major challenge to the American presence in Iraq. So, the Fallujah attack could not go unpunished, mainly because of the power of the appalling images (notice the importance of information-age media in shaping strategic events). For these reasons, and out of sheer anger, Bremer and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq, ordered, with Bush"s approval, the Marines to take Fallujah.
General Mattis may not have liked the order, but he was determined to carry it out. In early April, his Marines set up a cordon of nine checkpoints around the city to seal it off. Fallujah is wedged between the Euphrates to the west, a rail line to the north, and the desert to the south and east. The city only spans a few miles across, making it possible to cordon it off, even with the Marines" limited manpower. Engineers built berms to discourage movement at the edges of the city. The Marines only allowed food, water, and medical supplies to enter Fallujah. In early 2004, the population was probably about 300,000 people. Sensing what was in the offing, many of the locals began to leave in cars and on foot. The Marines screened them and allowed military-age males to leave only if they were with families. "The city is surrounded," one platoon leader at a checkpoint commented. "It"s an extended operation. We want to make a very precise approach to this. We want to get the guys we"re after. We don"t want to go in there with guns blazing."
However, the pending attack, dubbed Operation Vigilant Resolve, was much more ambitious than that. Any attempt to take the city would require much in the way of blazing guns. The politicians and the bra.s.s provided very little strategic direction to Mattis beyond orders to take the town. Mattis filled the vacuum by laying out the objectives: apprehend the perpetrators and the many foreign fighters who had been ma.s.sing in Fallujah for months, clear out all the heavy weapons, and reopen Highway 10 to American traffic. Four battalions, augmented by Army Delta Force and Special Forces soldiers, in all comprising about two thousand troops, would carry out the main a.s.sault, knifing into Fallujah from the northwest, northeast, southwest, and southeastern corners of town. The battalions comprised Regimental Combat Team 1, the modern incarnation of the old 1st Marine Regiment, with Colonel John Toolan, a reserved Brooklyn native of Irish heritage, in command. His ground troops could call upon support from AC-130 Spectre gunships, attack helicopters, unmanned aerial observation aircraft, and Air Force F-15s. As the a.s.sault proceeded, the Marines planned to inundate the city"s inhabitants with leaflets and loudspeaker p.r.o.nunciations that emphasized the Americans" strength and benevolent intentions. As one officer put it: "This is a flash bang strategy. Stun the bad guys with aggressive fire, then psyops [psychological operation] the s.h.i.t out of them, always coming back to the theme of the inevitability of the superior tribe."2 On the evening of April 4, after listening to a slew of fiery pep talks from their commanding officers, the Marines began their push into the city. Opposition consisted of about two thousand insurgents of varying quality and commitment. They were a mixture of Saddam loyalists, members of local tribes that opposed the American presence, youthful adventurers, former Iraqi Army soldiers, and hard-core jihadis, both local and foreign. They were armed with AK-47 rifles, RPK machine guns, mortars, and copious amounts of RPGs. Rather than one ent.i.ty with one commander, they were a patchwork of insurgent organizations under the loose control of various leaders. The insurgents usually fought in teams of five to ten men. The Marines generally referred to them as "muj," short for mujahideen, or holy warrior.
Fallujah"s narrow streets, st.u.r.dy buildings of brick, mortar, and concrete, and even many of its historic mosques comprised ideal fighting positions for these men. "Generally, all houses have an enclosed courtyard," one Marine infantryman wrote. "Upon entry into the courtyard, there is an outhouse large enough for one man. Rooftops and a large first-story window overlook the courtyard. Most houses have windows that are barred and covered with blinds or cardboard, restricting visibility into the house. The exterior doors of the houses are both metal and wood." Often the doors were protected by metal gates. Most of the structures were two stories and had only a couple of entry points. The rooms were "directly proportionate to the size of the house." In some cases, cars and buses blocked the likely avenues of the American advance.
The first night featured many sharp clashes, but the fighting intensified after daylight on April 5. Clad in body armor, laden down with weapons, ammunition, and equipment, the infantry Marines arduously worked their way block by block, deeper into Fallujah. The enemy fighters mixed with noncombatants, creating a broiling, confusing ma.s.s of humanity. One group of Marines saw an RPG-toting man stand among a crowd of women and children, aim his weapon, fire, and then run. Reluctant to fire into the crowd, the Marines chased him but he disappeared into the urban jungle. This scenario repeated itself countless times. Quite often, the Marines took to the rooftops and traded shots with insurgents across the street, or a block or two away. The key for the grunts was to stay away from the streets and crossroads.
When clearing buildings, the Marines spread themselves into a staggered, linear stack formation, against an exterior wall, near a door or other entryway. In the recollection of one grunt, as the point man burst into the house, "each Marine in the stack looks to the Marines to his front, a.s.sesses the danger areas that are not covered, and then covers one of them." They held their rifles erect, at their shoulders, ready to fire. Each man covered a corner of the room they were clearing. The key was to spend a minimum amount of time in "fatal funnels"-doorways, hallways, and other narrow spots where they were especially vulnerable to enemy fire. All too often, in this three-dimensional game of urban chicken, they came face-to-face with bewildered, frightened civilians. In most cases, the Marines did not speak Arabic and had no translators with them. They tried to tell the people to leave town, that the Marines were there to apprehend terrorists (or "Ali Babas" in local parlance), but communication was limited. Some of the people did leave. Others did not wish to leave their homes unprotected from the excesses of both sides. Most had no love for the Americans.
By midday on April 5, firefights were raging all over the city. "There was nothing fancy about this," an embedded correspondent wrote. "This was the cla.s.sic immemorial labor of infantry, little different from the way it had been practiced in Vietnam, World War II, and earlier back to the Greeks and Romans." Lieutenant Christopher Ayres and a squad from Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines (1/5), cornered a sniper and dueled with him in an alleyway. The lieutenant, a Texan who had entered the Corps as an enlisted man, came face-to-face with the sniper. "We both emptied a magazine, but didn"t hit each other." The insurgent"s AK rounds whizzed past Ayres and bounced off the alley walls. Chips from the wall nicked Ayres in the face. The sniper ran away, with Ayres"s squad and another group of Marines in hot pursuit. As they did so, they came under more fire from a house. An enemy riflemen shot one Marine in the throat and another in the thigh. Using the stack method, the Marines a.s.saulted the enemy house with grenades and rifle fire. In the melee, they captured three enemy fighters who were carrying grenades and rifles. There were also two women and five children in the house, but somehow they did not get hurt.
In the kitchen, a stalwart guerrilla shot First Lieutenant Josh Palmer, hitting him three times in the side, killing him. One of Palmer"s squad leaders put a bullet through the insurgent"s head. When Ayres arrived in the kitchen, he recognized the dead man as the sniper he had dueled with in the alley. "When they were searching the dead guy, they pulled up his shirt and found a pull cord attached to a white canvas suicide vest packed with blocks of C-4 explosive," Ayres said. "Thank G.o.d a Marine dropped the sniper dead in his tracks before he could pull the cord." The Marines left the kitchen, rolled a grenade in there, and bolted from the house. The explosion detonated the man"s suicide vest, blowing him to bits and leaving a three-foot-long trench in the remnants of the kitchen floor.
Ayres and his cohorts were part of a battalion effort to sweep through the industrial sector of southeastern Fallujah. The shabby streets teemed with run-down factories, warehouses, garages, and junkyards. Faces covered by keffiyehs, insurgents darted from structure to structure, snapping off RPG shots, spraying wildly with their AKs. The RPGs exploded twice-once when the gunner pressed the trigger and then again when the warhead impacted against its target. "We all crouched up against a wall as bullets whizzed by," Robert Kaplan, a leading military commentator who had embedded himself with Bravo Company, 1/5, recalled. "As the marines consolidated the position, the whistles turned to cracks and we stood up and relaxed a bit." Through binoculars, they could see the enemy fighters some one hundred meters away. "Men armed with RPG launchers, wearing checkered keffiyehs around their faces, could be seen surrounded by women and children, taunting us. Only snipers tried to get shots off."
A few blocks to the west, Lance Corporal Patrick Finnigan and his fire team from Charlie Company were in the middle of a whirlwind firefight with a dizzying array of muj fighters. "They had . . . sniper teams, machine gun teams, guys that were organized in four-man groups with Dragonovs [sniper rifles], RPGs," he said. "They had homemade weapons too that would shoot rockets that were just obscenely big, but not very accurate."
Finnigan was an Irish Catholic kid from suburban St. Louis who had joined the Corps after 9/11 for a complicated blend of reasons-patriotism, his parents" impending divorce, and because his college career had stalled. He was a veteran of the initial invasion of Iraq the year before. Like most every other Marine in his outfit, he had heard about the mutilated Americans and he was excited to take Fallujah and destroy the insurgency there. "It was basically an all-day fire exchange with the enemy, pushing "em back. That was pretty crazy. We were getting attacked from buildings, so we were taking positions behind . . . dirt mounds returning fire, doing fire and maneuver . . . and trying to close with them as much as we could." At one point, an RPG streaked past him and hit a Humvee behind him. Small fragments sprayed him all over his body. Each of the hits felt like "somebody holding . . . some fire on your skin." Corpsmen evacuated him to an aid station, where doctors gave him morphine and carefully picked out each fragment they could see. After the morphine wore off and the doctors had removed as many pieces as they could find, he returned to duty.
By and large, grunts like Finnigan were on their own during the push into the city. Their fire support came mainly from mortars as well as the Mark 19 grenade launchers, .50-caliber machine guns, and shoulder-launched multipurpose a.s.sault weapons (SMAW) from the battalion Weapons Company. Air support mainly consisted of Cobra helicopter gunships. The entire regimental combat team had only one company of M1A1 Abrams tanks from the Marine 1st Tank Battalion. They generally operated in pairs, helping the infantry wherever they were needed. Tank drivers sometimes had difficulty maneuvering their formidable beasts through the city. Tank commanders often had problems pinpointing the location of enemy fighters, even when taking fire from them. "It was very difficult to determine the direction, distance, and location of enemy rifle fire," Captain Michael Skaggs, the tank company commander, later said. "These sounds echoed around buildings, and the enemy remained concealed within dark areas. For tankers, muzzle flashes and rifle firing signatures were difficult to locate unless they had a general location to look." Usually, they were dependent upon the infantrymen to point out targets, often by firing rifle or machine-gun tracer rounds at the targeted building or street. At times, the tanks could be vulnerable to close-quarters enemy attacks if they did not have infantry support. For instance, Lance Corporal Finnigan was behind a mound, covering one tank that was close to a house, when he saw a teenager attempt to drop explosives down onto it from a rooftop. "It was only a hundred-meter, or two-hundred-meter . . . shot. I just put the triangle on the square and squeezed the trigger and he fell instantly." The ensuing explosion collapsed the entire roof of the building, but the tank was unscathed.3 The fighting raged on like this for three more days, with the Americans inflicting serious punishment on both the insurgents and the infrastructure of Fallujah. Militarily, the Americans were winning. General Mattis estimated that he needed only two or three more days to take the entire city. Politically, though, the Americans were on the verge of a catastrophe because of the unfair perception in Iraq and elsewhere that the Americans were unleashing destruction with impunity. In general, they tried to launch air strikes as judiciously, and with as much precision, as possible. They attempted to limit the destruction wrought by tanks, mortars, and other weapons. They especially hoped to avoid shooting at mosques, but when they took fire from the mosques, they returned it. Those journalists who were embedded with Marine infantry units attested to American restraint, although they were not in a position to see what was going on beyond the Marine lines.
The sad fact was that it simply was not possible to a.s.sault a sizable city without killing innocent people and wrecking private property. "Civilian casualties are accepted as inevitable in high-tech, standoff warfare," the military a.n.a.lyst and Marine combat veteran Bing West once wrote. "The infantryman does not stand off. The grunt must make instant, difficult choices in the heat of battle." For the average Marine infantryman, it could be quite difficult to determine who was a noncombatant and who was not. Men of all ages sometimes took potshots with RPGs or rifles, discarded the weapons, and then melted into crowds or buildings. Unarmed people, especially teenagers, watched the Marines and relayed information to the insurgents in person or on cell phones. Even women sometimes gathered intelligence in this fashion. Other unarmed men hid in buildings, spoke with mobile mortar teams on cell phones, and called down fire on the Americans. For the Marine grunt, any Fallujahn who was capable of walking and talking could potentially be a threat. How could he know which Iraqi was simply talking to a friend on his phone and which was pa.s.sing along information to insurgents on the next block? Needless to say, the environment was unforgiving.
As the fighting raged, General John Abizaid, the theater commander, claimed that the commanders at Fallujah had "attempted to protect civilians to the best of their ability. I think everybody knows that." But everyone did not know or believe that. Quite the opposite was true, actually. Worldwide media reports teemed with claims that the Americans were wantonly killing large numbers of civilians in Fallujah. One New York Times New York Times report, filed from Baghdad, told of a wounded six-year-old boy whose parents had been killed by American bullets. The boy told the report, filed from Baghdad, told of a wounded six-year-old boy whose parents had been killed by American bullets. The boy told the Times Times reporter, Christine Hauser, of seeing his brothers crushed to death when their house collapsed under the weight of bombs. "Iraqis who have fled Falluja [ reporter, Christine Hauser, of seeing his brothers crushed to death when their house collapsed under the weight of bombs. "Iraqis who have fled Falluja [sic] tell of random gunfire, dead and wounded lying in the streets, and ambulances being shot up," Hauser wrote. A subsequent story, filed this time from Fallujah itself, reported one gravedigger"s claim that, in the town cemetery, "there are [two hundred fifty] people buried here from American strikes on houses. We have stacked the bodies one on top of the other."
Arab media outlets, such as the notoriously anti-American TV network Al Jazeera, carried the most incendiary declarations of American-led destruction. As the fighting raged in Fallujah, the insurgents welcomed Al Jazeera reporter Ahmed Mansour and his film crew into the city. Mansour and his crew filmed many scenes of wounded Iraqis at Fallujah"s largest hospital. The images were awful-mutilated children, sobbing mothers, horribly wounded old people, blood-soaked beds, harried doctors and nurses, and dead bodies, including babies. The ghastly scenes ran continuously in a twenty-four-hour loop. The clear implication was that the Americans were wantonly killing and maiming. Hospital personnel claimed that the Americans had killed between six hundred and a thousand people. Because any Western journalist entering the insurgent-held portions of the city risked being kidnapped and beheaded, the Al Jazeera footage and claims comprised the main image of Fallujah before the world. Thus, the insurgents controlled the crucial realm of information, shaping world opinion-and more important, Iraqi public opinion-in their favor.
As with so much media reporting in the Internet age, the problem was lack of context. The visceral hospital scenes were horrifying to any decent human being. But the circ.u.mstances that caused this death and destruction were vague. Were these people deliberately targeted by the Americans? Had they actually been wounded and killed by American bombs, sh.e.l.ls, or small arms? Or had the insurgents done the damage? Were the civilians perhaps caught in the middle of firefights raging between the two sides? Had they clearly indicated their status as noncombatants? The pictures answered none of these reasonable questions. They only stood as accusatory portraits, with no corroboration, against the Americans, for the human suffering they had allegedly caused. By this time, insurgent groups in Iraq were masters at controlling information, using the Internet to spread anti-American propaganda and shaping the world"s perception of the war in their favor.
The result of all this was anger in Iraq over Fallujah. American policymakers, often troubled themselves by the pictures, did little to counter the Al Jazeera story line of U.S. barbarism. After a year of occupation, many Iraqis, Shiite and Sunni alike, were already boiling with bitterness against the Americans for a litany of problems, including chaotic violence, lack of electrical power, lack of potable water, nighttime raids against private homes by the Americans, and a slew of cultural tensions. The pictures from Fallujah made it seem as though the Americans were systematically destroying the city and its inhabitants, simply because of what had happened to their four contractors. Resentment morphed into abject hatred and hysteria, especially among those who had always opposed the U.S. invasion. One anti-American cleric, for instance, screeched on Al Jazeera that the Americans were modern-day Crusaders who intended to slaughter all Iraqis. "They are killing children!" he wailed. "They are trying to destroy everything! The people can see through all the American promises and lies!"
Even moderate Iraqis were outraged by what they saw on Al Jazeera. "My opinion of the Americans has changed," one Shiite store owner in Basra told a journalist. "When [they] came, they talked about freedom and democracy. Now, the Americans are pushing their views by force." Another middle-cla.s.s man was so angered by the video he saw of Fallujah that he declared: "We came to hate the Americans for that. The Americans will hit any family. They just don"t care." This was hardly the reality in Fallujah, but it became the perception among far too many Iraqis.
Consequently, as April unfolded, many of Iraq"s cities were on the verge of a total revolt against the Americans. Iraq was coming apart at the seams. Heavy fighting raged, not just in Fallujah but in Ramadi, the largest city in Al Anbar. Not only were the Sunnis rising up, but also some of the Shiites, particularly Moqtada al-Sadr"s Mahdi Army militia. In Najaf and the Sadr City section of Baghdad, his militiamen were fighting b.l.o.o.d.y pitched battles against the U.S. Army. The situation in Iraq was so bad, and the American control of the urban roads so shaky, that commanders worried about the possibility that their supply lines would soon be cut. The Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), a provisional body that Bremer"s CPA had devised to hasten the transition of Iraq from occupied country to a new sovereign democracy, was on the verge of dissolution. Several of the Council"s twenty-five members condemned the invasion of Fallujah and threatened to resign in protest. At least two members actually did resign. When the Americans attempted to legitimize the battle by sending Iraqi Army soldiers to help out, they mutinied. Nationwide, desertions among soldiers and policemen skyrocketed to 80 percent.
To top it all off, the political situation in the United States was also volatile, and in a presidential election year, no less. Antiwar sentiment was hardening. Governor Howard Dean, an avowed peace candidate, came close to winning the Democratic Party nomination before Senator John Kerry finally outpaced him. Kerry"s position on the war was ambiguous, but he was a harsh critic of the Bush administration"s handling of the conflict. He lambasted Bush for bungling the war and portrayed the war as a disaster. The Fallujah mess only added ammunition to Kerry"s a.r.s.enal. His candidacy reflected a significant component of the American electorate that had lost confidence in Bush"s leadership and viewed the war as a foolish, costly mistake, a b.l.o.o.d.y quagmire in the making. All of this threatened to severely damage Bush"s chances for reelection.
Under threat of this potential strategic meltdown, Bremer and Abizaid felt that they must halt the Fallujah operation or risk a ma.s.sive political defeat in Iraq. On April 9, they ordered the Marines to hold in place. Mattis and his leathernecks were incensed. They yearned to finish the job of taking Fallujah. Instead, Bremer, Abizaid, and other American authorities began an on-again, off-again, dizzying series of negotiations with the IGC, local sheiks, Fallujah city fathers, insurgent groups, and any other Iraqis who seemed to offer the possibility of a favorable resolution to the situation.
The Marine grunts could not understand why the bra.s.s was restraining them. The infantrymen"s dangerous reality was quite distant from the back-and-forth political maneuvering that had come to dominate the Fallujah story, but what they did know disgusted them. One grunt expressed their prevailing sentiment with a contemptuous parody of the negotiations: "Hey, Sheik b.u.t.t f.u.c.k, will you please, please, pretty please turn over those naughty little boys who slaughtered our people, burnt their bodies, and strung them up from that bridge?" Even more frustrating for the Marines, the negotiations took place against the backdrop of a supposed cease-fire, which existed only in name. Throughout April, plenty of fighting raged with much loss of life on both sides, but with no decisive result.
In fact, the end of American offensive operations provided a major respite to the guerrillas. They now had plenty of time to rest, rearm, reinforce, and carry out deliberate, calculated attacks on the Marines, and on their own turf, no less. "The Muj inside the city . . . just dug in deeper, slabbing up their machine-gun bunkers and mortar pits with fresh concrete," a Marine infantry platoon leader wrote. "They had plenty of food-most of it relief aid-and all the water in the river to drink."4 Each day the Marines hoped and expected to receive the order to renew their attack. It never came. Instead of advancing block by block, working toward the finite objective of taking the city, the frustrated Marine grunts found themselves stalemated, holed up in buildings, trading shots with any insurgents who messed with them. Snipers did much of the fighting. The urban jungle was a paradise of targets for them. "It"s a sniper"s dream," one of them said. As precision shooters, they were the perfect antidote in an urban setting to the excess of American firepower.
In a way, the snipers were also the ultimate manifestation of Marine Corps ethos. They were riflemen par excellence, masters at the art of precision killing. They embodied the notion that even in modern war, the individual fighter is still the ultimate weapon. This is the foundational philosophy of the Corps and it was on full display in Fallujah. In modern combat, snipers are the most personal of killers. They track, stalk, and spot their prey. They sometimes can see the expression on the faces of their victims-and even know something about their personal habits. This is rare in modern war, when soldiers shoot powerful weapons at their enemies but often do not know for sure if they ever hit or kill anyone. This is one reason why it is foolish and invasive to ask a combat soldier if he ever killed anyone. He probably does not know or, more likely, he does not want to know. If he has killed, then asking him that question is like asking him to reveal intimate secrets about himself, almost akin to demanding explicit details about his s.e.x life.
Every sniper has to embrace an equilibrium in his att.i.tude on killing or he simply cannot do the job. He has to avoid identifying or sympathizing with his victim too much, or he will be reluctant to kill him. On the other hand, he must guard against becoming drunk with the power of life and death, thirsting to kill anyone who enters his sights, regardless of whether that person is a threat or a valuable military target for the larger goal of fulfilling the mission. Striking the proper balance requires great strength of character and mental clarity. Each Marine sniper at Fallujah had to come to terms with becoming such a killer.
They set up in well-hidden positions on rooftops and near windows. They maintained a vigil, searching for insurgents day and night. Some of the shooters were graduates of the Marine scout sniper school"s rugged program. These craftsmen were often armed with M40A3 bolt-action rifles designed specifically for sniping. Other shooters were just good riflemen from infantry platoons. Lance Corporal Finnigan fit the latter category, although he had trained with the snipers on Okinawa for a few weeks before deploying to Iraq. Armed with an M16 that had an Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight (ACOG) mounted on its sight rail, Finnegan was ensconced on a rooftop, along with a machine gunner and a Mark 19 grenadier. "We had a couple of sandbags," he said. "We actually had a bunch of alternate positions, from different windows in the building. We had a chair set up." The chair was positioned about ten feet from any window or hole so as to shield the barrel of the rifle and provide some cover for Finnigan. The ACOG allowed him to see for many hundreds of meters, deep into enemy territory.
His best friend and several other platoon mates had been killed on the first day of the offensive, so he was itching for some payback. The rules of engagement were flexible. Anyone who was armed or moving military supplies or even pointing their fingers at the Marine positions was a legitimate target. The negotiations notwithstanding, Fallujah remained a war zone. Round the clock, plenty of shooting raged back and forth all over the city, and Finnigan"s spot in a section of the city the Marines called Queens was no different. Periodically they got sh.e.l.led by 120-millimeter mortars. They also took muj machine-gun and rifle fire.
Finnigan operated in twenty-minute shifts, giving his eyes plenty of time away from the gun sight to rest. "It"s not like you"re just sitting there behind the scope for hours at a time. That"s impossible. Your eye will get really tired. Everybody takes a turn." Many times, he spotted insurgents on the move and opened fire. "Most of these idiots would just be walking . . . and they had no idea where we were and they would have their weapons and neat little uniforms on or whatever. They"d just be walking down the street having no idea they were about to enter a killing zone." In all, he estimated that he killed fifteen of these armed men.
A couple dozen blocks to the north, in the Jolan district, Corporal Ethan Place, a trained scout sniper attached to the 2/1 Marines, was also hunting for targets. Like all scout snipers, he worked with a spotter, who helped him find targets, figure windage, and protect him from enemy snipers. Place and his partner spotted a group of insurgents rushing toward their positions, ducking through alleyways. The attackers would peek around a corner, launch an RPG in the Marines" direction, and then scramble back out of sight. Place concentrated on one especially active corner. Sure enough, an insurgent with an RPG started around that corner. Place squeezed the trigger of his M40A3 and hit the man full in the shoulder. Unlike Hollywood movies, the round did not knock him off his feet. He simply crumpled, twitched, and fell. Another enemy fighter, wearing a black ski mask, glanced around the same corner. Place waited until the man moved into the open and then shot him in the chest, killing him instantly. In the next few hours, he killed several more. "They look up the street and don"t see anyone," he said. "They can"t believe I can see them." When a white car with three armed men approached at three hundred meters, he killed all three of them. Needless to say, the enemy attack went nowhere.
In subsequent days, he killed numerous guerrillas who were trying to drag away the dead bodies of their comrades. He personally shot and killed at least thirty-two insurgents. His spotter got several more. The streets in their range of vision were strewn with maggot-infested, swollen, stinking carca.s.ses. There were so many flies feeding on the head of one body that it created the appearance of a full beard. At night dogs and cats tore at the corpses, sometimes eating all the way to the bone. The incessant howling and moaning of the animals provided an eerie sound track to the evening shadows. Overhead, AC-130s raked enemy-held buildings with cannon and Gatling gun fire. Psychological operations teams played heavy metal music by the likes of AC/DC and Drowning Pool. The muj countered with fiery anti-American rhetoric blared from the speakers of mosques: "America is bringing Jews from Israel and stealing Iraq"s oil. Women, take your children into the streets to aid the holy warriors. Bring them food, water, and weapons. Do not fear death. It is your duty to protect Islam." The competing sounds symbolized this epic clash of cultures. The irreverent Marines dubbed this surreal environment "LaLa-Fallujah" after a popular rock festival.
For the muj, the Marine snipers were the most terrifying weapon of all. They seemed to be everywhere, all-knowing and all-seeing. They meted out death so swiftly and so personally that they created great mental strain among the enemy fighters. They were so effective that Fallujah"s city elders and IGC negotiators began demanding their withdrawal as a precondition of any settlement in Fallujah. "I find it strange," Lieutenant General Conway replied to one such demand, "that you object to our most discriminate weapon-a Marine firing three ounces of lead at a precise target. I reject your demand, and I wonder who asked you to make it."5 But, by early May, that was about the only demand the Americans had rejected. By now, the Abu Ghraib scandal was in full bloom, only adding to the American strategic woes in Iraq. So, in spite of their obvious military successes in Fallujah, the Americans were now on such weak political footing that they agreed to a withdrawal. As a fig leaf to cover this obvious reversal, the Americans agreed to turn over the city"s security to the so-called Fallujah Brigade, a unit that was comprised mainly of former Iraqi soldiers and even some insurgents. The brigade would be armed and supported financially by the Americans. In exchange, they were to enforce a cease-fire and maintain peace in Fallujah. In reality, the Fallujah Brigade had no such capability, mainly because its members sympathized with, or were even part of, the insurgency. Turning over the city to them was tantamount to giving it to the guerrillas.
When the grunts heard the withdrawal order, they felt betrayed, bitter, and very angry. Many felt that they were being cheated out of a victory that they and their fallen brother Marines had earned. Thoroughly disgusted, Lieutenant Ilario Pantano, a rifle platoon leader in Echo Company, 2/2 Marines, turned to a Time Time magazine reporter who had covered many wars and asked: "Does this remind you of another part of the world in the early 1970s?" The allusion to Vietnam was clear. Like every other Marine in his company, Lance Corporal Finnigan was peeved and frustrated by the order. "It was bulls.h.i.t. It was a tough pill to swallow. It just wasn"t much fun to hear that." Major Dave Bellon, the intelligence officer for RCT-1, knew the realities in Fallujah as well as, or better than, any other American. His a.s.sessment was dead-on: "We"re letting the muj off the canvas. They"ll use Fallujah as a base to hit us." magazine reporter who had covered many wars and asked: "Does this remind you of another part of the world in the early 1970s?" The allusion to Vietnam was clear. Like every other Marine in his company, Lance Corporal Finnigan was peeved and frustrated by the order. "It was bulls.h.i.t. It was a tough pill to swallow. It just wasn"t much fun to hear that." Major Dave Bellon, the intelligence officer for RCT-1, knew the realities in Fallujah as well as, or better than, any other American. His a.s.sessment was dead-on: "We"re letting the muj off the canvas. They"ll use Fallujah as a base to hit us."
As the Marines left, their supposed Fallujah Brigade "allies" jeered and glared at them. Some turned and pantomimed defecating in the direction of the Americans. Others jubilantly waved Saddam-era flags. "They [Americans] told us to change our uniforms," one of them told a reporter, "but we refused. We are not with the Americans. We are Iraqi fighters." Another brigade member said of the Americans: "They lost. They should leave." One of the insurgents crowed that "this is a great victory for the people of Iraq. The mujahideen and the Falluja [sic] Brigade are brothers." Many of the Fallujahns agreed. A triumphal mood permeated much of the city. Armed men in pickup trucks honked their horns in celebration. Groups of men and teenagers stood together cheering on street corners. "We believe G.o.d saved our city," one of them said. "And we believe they [Americans] learned a lesson . . . not to mess with Fallujah." Storefronts featured signs with such p.r.o.nunciations as "We have defeated the devil Marines!" and "Jihad has triumphed!"
They were wrong, though. They had not defeated the Americans. The Americans had defeated themselves. Their self-imposed reversal was the result of their strategic f.e.c.klessness, their vacillating political and military leadership, their cultural ignorance, and, most of all, their fatal willingness to allow the enemy to shape world opinion in an information age. For a nation that pioneered the concept of ma.s.s media, the American inability to competently tell their own side of the Fallujah story and thus counter the endless drumbeat of insurgent propaganda was both stunning and unacceptable. The sad result was an artificial defeat and a city thrown to the metaphorical wolves.
At Fallujah in the spring of 2004, the Americans carried out 150 air strikes that destroyed 75 buildings with about a hundred tons of explosives-hardly an excessive onslaught. The number of dead civilians ranged between 270, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Health, and somewhere just north of 600, according to Al Jazeera. Insurgent losses have never been pinpointed but they were probably well into the hundreds (of course, part of the problem in calculating the casualties is figuring out who was truly a noncombatant and who was not). The Americans lost 27 killed and over 100 wounded, essentially for no tangible results. Fallujah in the spring of 2004 could not have contrasted more sharply with Aachen in 1944, when American soldiers fought an urban battle with no political constraints and no world condemnation. At Fallujah, politics and popular perception shaped everything. In the end, the Americans lacked the strategic clarity and force of leadership to attain their objectives. Rarely has an operation been more poorly named than Vigilant Resolve in April 2004.6 Timing Is Everything: Back to the Malignant City in November.
Fallujah grew much worse as 2004 unfolded. As many of the Marines had feared after the cease-fire settlement back in the spring, Fallujah"s various insurgent groups solidified their hold on the city. They used it as a sanctuary and a launching point for attacks on the Americans in Al Anbar. Practically every day, they attacked the Americans with a vexing mix of IEDs, Vehicle Borne IEDs (VBIEDs), suicide bombings, mortars, rockets, and shootings. The Americans responded with raids, targeted air strikes, cordon and searches. The casualties piled up on both sides. In Fallujah, there were, according to Marine intelligence sources, seventeen separate insurgent groups and about a dozen important leaders, the most notorious of whom was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who headed up al-Qaeda in Iraq. Together they co-opted the traditional influence of local tribes in Fallujah.
Like a tumor, the power of these terrorist gangs metastasized into a malignant growth on the Iraqi body politic. Even as Al Anbar burned with resistance to the Americans and the new Iraqi Interim Government (IIG) the Americans had created in June, Fallujah stood out as a no-go area of special defiance. It was essentially a city-state of its own, a hostile challenge to a fledgling, Shiite-controlled Iraqi government that was struggling for legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, especially Al Anbar Sunnis.
By summer"s end, local imams and guerrilla leaders, many of whom were foreigners, had imposed hard-line Islamic strictures (known as sharia law) on the city. Operating from one of the city"s numerous mosques, a ruling council known as the Mujahideen Shura enforced this radical interpretation of Islam, sometimes with harsh punishment. This witch"s brew of local insurgents, sheiks, imams, and foreign terrorists imposed a Hobbesian sort of gang rule on Fallujahns. Alcohol of any kind was forbidden. Anyone caught selling it or consuming it was flogged or spat upon. Western-style haircuts, CDs, music, and magazines were all forbidden, sometimes on the threat of death.
The terrorists often watched the American bases throughout Anbar and took note of which locals worked there. When they left work, the insurgents would abduct them, take them to their strongholds in Fallujah, and kill them. "Summary executions inside Fallujah happen with sobering frequency," Bellon, newly promoted to lieutenant colonel, wrote in the fall. "We have been witness to the scene on a number of occasions." He was still serving as RCT-1"s intelligence officer. Thanks to camera-equipped unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) circling over Fallujah, he sometimes saw these murders happen in real time. "Three men are taken from the trunk of a car and are made to walk into a ditch, where they are shot. Bodies are found in the Euphrates without heads washed downstream from Fallujah."
The most gruesome murders were the beheadings that went on in various torture chambers the terrorists established among Fallujah"s many anonymous blocks of houses. The most infamous example was Zarqawi"s beheading of Nicholas Berg, an American hostage, on May 7. In Berg"s case, and in many others, the killers broadcast their grisly handiwork to the rest of the world via the Internet and Al Jazeera. In another instance, hooded terrorists stood before a camera and forced a kneeling man to confess that he had helped the Americans. They then cut his head off. Chanting and praying, they plopped the b.l.o.o.d.y severed head back onto the victim"s torso. The editor of this particular execution video interspersed the beheading with Al Jazeera images of American air strikes and the women and children who had allegedly been killed as a result of them.
"I don"t think we could overstate . . . the presence of that city as a sanctuary for terrorists, criminal groups, Muslim extremists, [and] indigenous members of various resistance groups," Lieutenant Colonel Willie Buhl, commander of 3/1 Marines, told a historian in October. "The presence of that sanctuary has done more to impede the progress we"re trying to make here than anything else I can think of." He was especially distressed by how easy it was for Zarqawi and other thugs in Fallujah to "pull on historic ties and bring the tribe leaders and hold them accountable, coerce them, to intimidate them."
In many cases, the imams, who were supposed to act as moral leaders in the community, eagerly abetted the work of the terrorists and profited from their dominance. "The imams use the mosques to gain control over ignorant people," Lieutenant Colonel Bellon said. "They preach hate, and that"s not a religion. I keep the book on these guys. Most of them are criminals. They own the real estate, they send out thugs to shake down the truck drivers doing the run to Jordan, they fence the stolen cars and organize the kidnappings. They get a cut of every hijacked truck. They could teach Al Capone how to extort a city. They use young, gullible jihadists as their p.a.w.ns." It was as if Fallujah was now run by an especially malevolent combination of Cosa Nostra and the Taliban.7 Basically, the situation was intolerable. In January of 2005, Iraqis were supposed to go to the polls to elect a permanent government. Continued status quo in Fallujah could threaten the legitimacy and security of those elections. Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and his interim government in Baghdad spent much of 2004 ignoring Fallujah and then attempting to negotiate some sort of peace settlement with the city fathers. By the fall, though, Allawi knew that he could no longer allow the insurgents to flourish there. If he did, he would steadily lose face, and power, with the Iraqi people.
American leaders, military and political, knew by the fall that the withdrawal from Fallujah had been a terrible mistake. They knew they must take the city, and they now understood that timing was everything in this regard. Learning from their mistakes, the Americans spent much of the fall cultivating a suitable political environment for the violent urban battle they were planning. They lined up the support of Allawi and his allies. They arranged for reliable Iraqi troops to partic.i.p.ate in the a.s.sault. They established checkpoints outside the city in order to control access in and out of Fallujah. To avoid potential supply problems, they secured all the roads around the city. Utilizing a nice blend of aerial photographs, local informant reports, and reconnaissance patrols, they gathered a wealth of good information on the insurgents, their methods, their weaponry, their defenses, and their whereabouts.
They estimated that the city was defended by about two to three thousand fighters of varying quality and commitment. About a quarter of these men were hard-core foreign fighters who had come to Iraq for a showdown with the American infidels. On satellite and UAV surveillance photographs, the Americans even a.s.signed a number to every one of Fallujah"s thirty-nine thousand buildings. Perhaps most important of all, they were much more aggressive, and effective, at dealing with Fallujah"s noncombatant population and shaping popular perceptions of their intentions. "We had public affairs, civil affairs, and IO [Information Operations] all sitting down at the same table, working through the themes, to make sure we were getting the effect that we wanted," Lieutenant General John Sattler, who had succeeded General Conway as commander of I Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF), said.
In September and October, American and Iraqi officials repeatedly urged the city"s civilian population to leave town before the impending battle. "We . . . used radio messages, some of which were generic to Al Anbar province, but a lot of them were targeted to the people of Fallujah," Major Andy Dietz, an Army information operations officer attached to RCT-1, later said. "We would do loudspeaker broadcasts from the periphery of the city, especially on Fridays doing counter-mosque messages. We would pa.s.s out handbills in places we knew people were transiting into the city." The Americans also dropped leaflets blaming the guerrillas for Fallujah"s sickly economic state. "We would . . . tell the people of Fallujah that you would have had a water treatment plant this month except that your city is full of insurgents," said Major General Richard Natonski, who had taken over command of 1st Marine Division when Mattis was promoted in August.
In addition to explaining how terrorist control of Fallujah was hurting them, the leaflets outlined the American rules of engagement in the coming battle. Because of the threat of VBIEDs and SVBIEDs (suicide car bombers), all vehicles would be considered hostile, as would anyone with a weapon. The leaflets and other announcements communicated an air of inevitability about the notion of Fallujah"s return to coalition control. "[We] let the people in Fallujah know we"re coming," Colonel Craig Tucker, commander of RCT-7, said. "We"re not telling you when we"re coming, but we"re coming. And they left. And what you had left in there was those guys who were gonna fight you."
The insurgents still enjoyed some popular support among the people, but many months of repression had taken its toll, ebbing the anti-American euphoria of the spring. Most Fallujahns had no wish to fight alongside the jihadis or to take their chances of avoiding American bombs and bullets. They voted with their feet. As of early November, almost 90 percent of the population had left the city, thus creating an isolated urban battlefield in which the Americans could liberally use their ma.s.sive firepower. They had essentially emptied the city in antic.i.p.ation of turning it into a battlefield, an unprecedented feat in modern military history. The exodus did have a downside, though. Some of the terrorists, including Zarqawi, escaped from Fallujah. They evaded the American checkpoints by blending in with the crowds.
By November, whether President Bush won or lost his election contest with Senator Kerry, he had decided to take Fallujah. When he defeated Kerry on November 2, the victory only added that much more urgency to the impending offensive, as well as a more stable political environment for Allawi"s government. The prime minister declared a state of emergency in Iraq and, on November 7, after one last failed attempt at negotiations with Fallujah"s leaders, he ordered the a.s.sault to commence. In a strategic sense, this dotted the last political i"s and crossed the final t"s. Of course, this did not necessarily mean that politics were no longer a factor. The Americans initially dubbed the a.s.sault Operation Phantom Fury but Allawi renamed it Operation Al Fajr (The Dawn), a moniker he felt was less vengeful and more appropriate to the circ.u.mstances.8 The Breach.
The insurgents may have been cruel, but they were smart and determined. They spent months fortifying Fallujah and its approaches. American intelligence a.n.a.lysts identified 306 separate strongpoints throughout the city. The mujahideen used half of Fallujah"s seventy-two mosques for military purposes. They lined the streets with car bombs. Other cars and pickup trucks blocked the roads and entry points to the town. They placed IEDs in every imaginable spot-houses, curbs, manhole covers, telephone poles, and any other likely American transit point. They wired up entire buildings with hundreds of pounds of explosives. They dug holes, trenches, and house-to-house tunnels to create good fighting positions and escape routes for themselves. "Fallujah is a city designed for siege warfare," a sergeant said. "From the studs to the minarets, every G.o.dd.a.m.ned building is a fortress. The houses are minibunkers with ramparts and firing slits cut into every rooftop. Every road into the city is strong-pointed, mined, and blocked with captured Texas barriers [full of dirt]."
The jihadis used bulldozers to build a ring of mined berms around the city, especially to the north along a five-foot-high railroad embankment (quite similar, actually, to the railroad that bordered Aachen). In the days leading up to the American a.s.sault, the most dedicated foreign fighters stationed themselves on the outer edges of Fallujah, in the upper floors of multistory buildings, in ideal position to launch RPGs, call down mortar fire, or snipe at the Americans. In some spots, the insurgents stacked tall heaps of tires in the streets. American commanders feared that when the attack began, the enemy would set fire to the tires, similar to what Mohammed Aidid"s militiamen had done at Mogadishu in 1993, to create clouds of black smoke that could negate the effectiveness of UAVs and other supporting aircraft. By now, the number of enemy fighters in Fallujah ranged between twenty-five hundred and forty-five hundred men (estimates vary). Overall, it is fair to say that their defenses in November were far more elaborate and formidable than they had been in April.
Fortunately, so was the American battle plan. By and large, this plan was the brainchild of Generals Sattler and Natonski. As the corps-level commander of I MEF, Sattler concentrated on cutting off Fallujah from the outside world. He borrowed a brigade-sized combat team from the Army"s 1st Cavalry Division to secure every external approach to Fallujah. A battalion from the British Army"s Black Watch regiment also a.s.sisted in this mission. Natonski, the division commander, focused on taking the city itself. He pulled a bait and switch on the enemy. Through a series of raids and feints, he led them to believe that the main a.s.sault was coming from the south and east of Fallu